FREE THE BLOG!

An interview with Blake Morrison

26 co-founder Tom Lynham interviews the writer and literary critic Blake Morrison about his role in the 2010 FREE THE WORD Festival.

 

I met up with Blake in the Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank, which has been such a focus for FREE THE WORD since its inception. This year, he chaired a deeply revealing conversation with the great American storyteller Richard Ford. On the closing night - a celebration of revolutionary writing - Blake read an electrifying excerpt from his latest novel - The Last Weekend. Blake co-edited the Penguin Book of Contemporary Poetry with Andrew Motion. His memoir – And When Did You Last See Your Father? is a highly acclaimed best seller. Other books include Things That My Mother Never Told Me, and the novel South of the River. Blake is a former Literary Editor of The Observer and The Independent on Sunday, and he is Professor of Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths. I began by telling Blake a little about 26, and how we have been working with International PEN.

 

Tom

“26 is a network of around 300 members who are busy in many areas of the media. We are passionate evangelists for great writing, and help organisations to think more creatively about how they use language. We became involved with International PEN for the first FREE THE WORD festival, and have collaborated on various projects ever since. For 2010 we set up a blog to mark the 50th year of the Writers in Prison Committee. We love bringing diverse groups of communicators together. Why do you work with PEN?”

 

Blake

“I’ve been a supporter of PEN for a long time. I was on the Executive Committee of English PEN for 10 years, and then Vice President. Of course many other human rights organisations do great work, but no one else makes the contribution that PEN does to freedom of expression. So it’s really important to support that - as a writer - but also as a citizen of the world.”

 

Tom

“What has been your experience of meeting writers through PEN, and how have you interacted with the organisation?”

 

Blake

“My interest began almost before PEN when I was working at The Observer. There was a major campaign to release the Russian poet Irina Ratushinskaya who was imprisoned for her beliefs and writing. Eventually – miraculously – she was set free and I interviewed Irina on her first day in England. Listening to her story and how she secreted notes and wrote on the walls of cells really impressed on me the importance of PEN. To meet someone who just a few days before had been in a Soviet camp was a big moment. More generally, I’ve supported PEN with some degree of usefulness and participated on different campaigns. One of them was to broaden the constituency of the PEN membership. When I joined English PEN you had to be a published writer. I became increasingly aware that a lot of readers interested in literature felt as strongly as PEN did about the issues, so we changed the rules of membership. There was some resistance from older members who liked the idea of a club, but PEN is essentially a writers’ organisation that should be inclusive. So, the work we do with imprisoned writers and freedom of expression is what defines PEN for me.”

 

Tom

“What is it about PEN’s activities that can cut through entrenched political systems in a way that others can’t?”

 

Blake

“We articulate through words our deepest thoughts and feelings. When you spend all day working with words, sometimes you can articulate things that others are feeling in a way that a dry political approach cannot. That is the role of the creative writer, the poet, and the novelist. They can engage at the human level, touch people, move people and inspire people to take action.”

 

Tom

“To mark the Writers in Prison Committee’s 50^th year we twinned 50 members of 26 with writers PEN have supported over the decades. I began the 26:50 blog with 1960 and wrote about the Albanian writer Musine Kokalari. I was overwhelmed by the courage of this heroic woman who stood up to the brutality of the post war regime. She was gagged and incarcerated for 30 years. To devote your life to the freedom of expression of others is an incredible sacrifice to make.”

 

Blake

“Yes, and it becomes even more vital. We have to confront the regimes suppressing free speech, but a second form of oppression has emerged driven by religion and the rise of fundamentalism. I thought that as the world became increasingly secular it would fade away, but that hasn’t happened. It has raised a whole new raft of issues. Writers have to be strong and defend their right to say things that might be unpalatable. They must express their beliefs and convictions, and PEN has actively addressed religious issues. The other key event for me was the Rushdie affair, which I became very involved with. I was at The Observer when the fatwa was announced. Rushdie was in hiding, but we managed to get books through for him to review. Then I moved to The Independent on Sunday and interviewed him for his first long piece about the whole nightmare. The Rushdie affair galvanised things for many writers. We had just assumed people would accept that a novel has playfulness about it. But for it to be read so literally and treated as an insult indicates the depth of sensitivities involved. I think most of us felt very strongly that we had to support Rushdie and his right to publish that novel. There have been these landmark things in my time, which just strengthen my belief in the importance of freedom of expression, and the need to defend fellow writers when governments try to silence them.”

 

Tom

“We collaborated on a translation project with International PEN last year called 26 Exchanges in which members of 26 were twinned with PEN writers in various countries. My twin was the Colombian poet Rubén Darío Flórez Arcila and he wrote a poem for me. I’m not an academic and don’t speak Spanish, so it was not about achieving a literal translation, but the story of the journey from one language into another. It raised my writing because I had to interpret metaphors and abstract ideas. Studying someone else’s work through the eyes of others from different cultures, broadened my emotional articulation, and I wonder if you have had similar experiences.”

 

Blake

“I’ve worked with other writers on adaptations and translations more than collaborations. I’ve worked with musicians and artists, and I wrote two librettos for the composer Gavin Bryars. The artist Paula Rego produced some drawings and paintings based on poems of mine, and I took things from her too. Like PEN, I’ve always believed in the exchange through translation. I am not a great linguist, but exposure to other cultures, languages and alternative forms of writing broadens your outlook. I have adapted plays and translated poems very freely from other languages. It’s the importance of exchange between writers and cultures - all the more important in a culture like ours that tends to be insular. We need periods of being at our desks, being alone and thinking. But I have always found it thrilling to work in other media with actors, directors and composers. You feel better for the exchange and new influences invigorate your writing. We are so good at promoting British culture, but we need to embrace, understand and learn from other ideas in other languages.”

 

Blake rushed off to the National Theatre, and I wandered over Hungerford Bridge, across a River Thames drenched in evening sunshine. One of the most compelling speakers in this year’s FREE THE WORD festival was the Egyptian writer and psychiatrist Nawal El Saadawi who talked about her work at The Writers in Prison Committee 50^th Anniversary Celebration at the LSE. Her campaigning for the rights of women and social equality has led to systematic persecution by the Egyptian authorities. Her life has been threatened and Government agencies have even tried to revoke her Egyptian citizenship. Despite her struggles she radiates an irrepressible optimism. The lecture theatre rocked with laughter as she told of an experience in yet another Egyptian jail. Political dissidents were denied privileges and packed into a cell with beggars and vagrants. Nawal had the nerve to ask a guard for pencil and paper, but was told that these were considered to be ‘even more dangerous’ than a gun, and if caught she would be severely punished. Despite this, she managed to procure toilet paper and eyeliner from some prostitutes in the neighbouring cell and wrote a book in secret. Nawal recommended that we all go to jail at least once in our lives, because it’s the place where you find out who you really are.

Shakespeare the Palestinian

Claire Falcon reviews Free the Word meets Beirut 39

You know what it’s like. In a flush of enthusiasm, you agree to something, and then suddenly it comes round and you find yourself in the middle of a busy week thinking, ‘hell, why did I agree to this? I’ve got [fill in appropriate busy-Londoner-type excuse] to get done today’. The evil thought pops into your head, ‘well, I suppose I could cut it… when you’re freelance, work really must come first’. Then the angel on the other side wags its finger and says (sounding remarkably like my father) ‘you must live up to your responsibilities!’

 

So I found myself rushing towards Farringdon last Thursday lunchtime, cutting it fine as usual, but clearly the angels were winning because there was not a tube delay in sight; even a Circle Line train appeared within minutes. A handful of people was scattered about when I arrived, and I thought, ‘oh well, one of those, then’. But within a few minutes, the seats were full, and, in fact, more and more people kept coming in during the talk til they were lining the walls. (‘Really, it’s so rude not to be on time,’ I thought priggishly, my own near miss with the tube conveniently forgotten.)

 

It was only while I was waiting for it to start that I really switched on to what the talk was all about – and it made me mightily ashamed of my shabbily casual attitude to turning up. Two writers were there to talk about their work. Two writers who, despite being from the same land, could only meet far away in London. Ala Hlehel is a Palestinian writer with an Israeli passport living in Haifa. Adania Shibli is a Palestinian writer living across the border.

 

The format of the talk was quite simple. Ask the author a few questions about his / her work and then ask them to read a bit. We’re so used to reading these days, but being read to is something most of us probably haven’t experienced much since we were kids. There’s something uniquely powerful about hearing a writer speak his own words. But what made this talk unusual was that both were, of course, reading in translation.

 

The two stories were very different – Adania’s about a girl in her local Post Office, Ala’s a fable about how a writer became a writer (although he claims it’s not a story about himself). Both made me want to buy the book – so a good sales opportunity, clearly.

 

However it was much more than just a book reading. Things became increasingly animated as the two writers told what it was like to live in a country where your identity is denied. Ala talked about the irony of holding an Israeli passport, which allowed him to visit all sorts of places but not many Arab countries, while abhorring the label ‘Israeli Arab’. I’ve never thought deeply about such a definition, and indeed, when he said it, my naïve reaction was, is it that important?

And the answer is yes it is important. Fundamental, even. Because, as he explained, the term cuts off his identity. It denies his history, implying the beginning of his family’s existence only in 1948. From what they both said, it is these personal experiences, these everyday challenges of defining who you are when your identity is something you have to fight for, that affect you and therefore shape your experience as a writer.

 

‘Ask the Israelis to recognise me and my rights, and then I will talk’, and ‘The dialogue I’m interested in is the dialogue with the man at the checkpoint’, were the answers to a question from the floor about the value of talking to Israeli writers. And who could blame them?

 

But while this may have been a challenging point of view to those of us used to the freedom of being able to express our views however we like, the atmosphere was not at all negative. In fact, what could be more uplifting than Adania’s answer to the final question about what Arabic literature influenced her. ‘To me, all literature is Arabic literature, because I read it in Arabic and therefore I feel it is Arabic. Tolstoy and Shakespeare – they are Palestinians!’

 

God bless the angels.

26:50 - Coming together

John Simmons looks back at 26:50, Free The Word - and the need for stamina

Quite a week. Ran marathon in Paris on Sunday. Hobbled around Paris Monday, home Tuesday. Workshop at The Writer on Wednesday, then reception for International PEN’s Free the Word. Green light for new PEN identity on Thursday. Gathering at Royal Festival Hall for 26:50 writers on Friday.

Some big long-term projects came to a conclusion this week, and Sunday was a fine send-off to much of that physical and mental effort. With the marathon done, I could get back to my usual Sunday morning run: through Highgate Woods and Hampstead Heath, back home to Muswell Hill. It now seemed a short ten miles. I loved it. These are parts of London that I wouldn’t swap for anywhere else in the world.

In the evening we went to the Purcell Room at the South Bank to the final event of PEN’s Free the Word festival. I’d started out by naming this two years ago. Since then the relationship with PEN and 26 has blossomed. It’s led to a new identity, visual and verbal, and to two creative collaborations between 26 and PEN. Both those collaborations came together on Sunday evening.

Sunday was the 51^st day of the 26:50 campaign. Writers from 26 had posted daily responses, exactly 50 words, to the life and work of writers who have been threatened, imprisoned or murdered for their writing. The campaign was to mark 50 years of PEN’s Writers in Prison committee. For 50 days, 50 different writers from 26 had produced brilliantly concise pieces of writing with an extraordinary emotional range. Sunday was the 51^st day of the campaign, and the final piece appeared, Elise Valmorbida’s “The Unnamed Writer” http://26-50.tumblr.com/

So 26:50 came to a poignant close. It also joined, like two streams forming one river, the earlier project called 26 Exchanges. This had appeared first, as an exhibition and a book, at last September’s London Design Festival. It had involved UK-based writers responding to the work of PEN writers from different parts of the world. How do you respond – translate, comment, think – when faced by another writer’s completely different language and culture? I’d sub-titled the book  Journeys between and behind the lines of language .  The exhibition used extracts from the Exchanges in the writers’ own voices and it was a moving experience, created with the design skills of Harry Pearce at Pentagram and Sanky at All of Us. Now we’d been given the opportunity to show a 5-minute film version before and after the final Free the Word event.

The event celebrated the birthdays of Chinua Achebe and Derek Walcott, two of the world’s greatest living writers. Volcanoes in Iceland played havoc with the writers’ attendance but Achebe joined in by video link from New York and Walcott by audio. There were some wonderful readings. Eighty years old and Achebe and Walcott were as vital as ever.

Their readings were topped and tailed by the animated type and voices of 26 Exchanges on screen as the audience came in and went out. Even as I write this I’m realising that the link between all these activities is stamina. It’s a quality we all need as writers, but not often recognised. The apparent results of our efforts might be only a few words, but they have to be the right words. It can take an awful lot of effort, to make those words seem effortless.

The shortlist for The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Winner announced 13 May

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/apr/16/shortlist-independent-foreign-fiction-prize

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/apr/15/nawal-el-saadawi-egyptian-feminist

An interview with Nawal El Saadawi, Egypt's radical feminist

26:50 - Thoughts on a broken mirror

Rowenna Forbes reflects on her 26:50 post

Here's a little more detail about the writer I was paired with at random, and how I chose my particular 50 words.

Firstly, the form. I wanted to use the restriction of 50 words as tightly as possible, giving them flow and pace. So I hijacked the Japanese senryu, whose three-line form of three-five-three syllables gave the poem a consistent rhythm, without allowing the cadence to overshadow the words themselves.

On considering the content of my 50 words, I was particularly struck by two central themes of Uzbek writer Mamadali Makhmudov's story:

1. Irony
Because the circumstances of his current imprisonment are so devastatingly ironic. Having lived under the Soviet regime and craved freedom from it for many years; having bravely written a novel during this period that struck a symbolic blow to that regime and that he was subsequently derided for; having outridden that storm to be commended for his book when Uzbekistan's independence finally arrived... Makhmudov then found he was persecuted again, imprisoned and tortured by his own countrymen, under the new regime whose existence he had dreamt of for so long.

His world was turned upside down, shattered by the realisation of his dream.

2. Violence
Makhmudov's testimony during his trial and his subsequent letters from prison outline horrific practices of torture said to be rife within the prisons of Uzbekistan; a culture of often sadistic violence that is described as "endemic" and condemed by human rights groups. An extract from Makhmudov's writings gives just a taste of the atrocities he claims to have experienced.

Mamadali Makhmudov is not a well man. In prison, he has experienced three heart attacks and a whole host of debilitating illnesses, not to mention the bruising stemming from ongoing abuse. The mention of rape in my poem is not merely gratuitous: our writer claims that he has witnessed first-hand the rape of prisoners, although there is no indication that this horror happened to him.

The broken mirror
This is a metaphor for Uzbek independence as experienced by Makhmudov: a cruelly ironic reflection of his desires distorted by corruption and violence. A regime whose rhetoric of freedom belies the fact of his imprisonment; whose constituent parts are used as tools of violence against him. Into this mirror Makhmudov gazes and observes as his body, along with his vision of independence, wastes away.

His one weapon remains his writing. Just as he once wrote The Eternal Mountains to express dissent against the Soviet regime, now he is driven to write letters to the Uzbek president and to others in the outside world about the truth of his imprisonment, and that of other people like him, other "sons of Uzbekistan".

Imprisoned, Mamadali Makhmudov finds that writing continues to free his voice. And perhaps, if enough people come to pay attention to his ongoing plight, it will eventually free the rest of him, too.

The Ex-Empire Strikes back

Rishi Dastidar on the opening event of Free The Word 2010

So, to the Purcell Room, for a robust conversation between Margaret Busby, James Kelman and Olive Senior (chaired by Maya Jaggi) about the battle - and I think it's fair to say that all thought that was (and is) a battle - to open up English to other identities.

What was striking was how much this remains strongly contested political ground. As Kelman forcefully reminded us, in many places official English has been imposed as a punishment, so writing in your own 'voice', taking and shaping English into a pattern that is reflective of your natural syntax and rhythm is not only a way of being authentic - it is rebellion too, a way of overcoming marginalsiation too.

Don't doubt that this is a hard road to take: Senior was very clear on the fact that she was treated earlier in her career as being unable to write in English because she wrote in an authentic Jamaican voice ("'We like it, but why don't you write it in English?'"), reminding us of the fact that not being from the centre still means that you are both exoticised and treated as unrepresentative of mainstream culture. And that view can also mean that you struggle to be taken seriously as an artist, and have to fight to escape the 'naturalistic' tag, the idea that you are nothing more than a mere 'transcriber'.

Busby also reflected on the fact that a lot these hurdles are, and remain, structural - it's unsurprising that a mainly white, middle class publishing industry buys and attempts to sell books that reflects this perspectives, and for this reason alone, championing diversity in the industry makes sense - it opens up another strand of possibilities.

(One final thought: When Kelman was reading, you could shut your eyes and imagine for a moment that rap had been invented in Govan rather than the Bronx. A pleasing, if incongruous, thought.)

26:50 - Writing for Dawit

Nick Asbury on the background to his 26:50 contribution

 

Dawit Isaak is an Eritrean-born Swedish citizen, arrested in 2001 for his work as a reporter on Eritrea's first independent newspaper.

 

I found it hard to track down Dawit's own writings, but found plenty of material about his predicament – one shared by many writers imprisoned without charge and tortured by the Eritrean government.

 

One phrase that echoed in my head was the reported response by security guards when a group of mothers arrived at one of the prisons to ask after the condition of the inmates. "You have no right to ask" was the reply ­– it later became the title of an Amnesty report into the situation.

 

This initially led me to write a different poem to the one submitted. It went like this:

 

The Mask

Don't ask me who I am.

You have no right to ask.

Don't hide your face in your hands.

My face is its own mask.

 

Don't ask me what I mean.

Don't ask me what it's like.

You have no right to scream.

What gives you the right?

 

I felt this worked as an echo chamber for the guard's comment, amplifying its unnerving lack of humanity. However, I also felt the poem could work harder and be more specific to Dawit himself. Thinking about his role as a journalist led me to the language of that world, which was the inspiration for the poem I finally submitted – a kind of writer's revenge fantasy, and a place-holder for the better words that Dawit will one day, hopefully, be free to write.

 

In both cases, the 50-word limit led naturally to an eight-line poem with a two-word title. On finishing each poem, I was surprised and relieved at how they fitted exactly to the limit.

 

You can find out more about the campaign to free Dawit Isaak and sign a petition at http://www.freedawit.com (see top right of page for English language option)

T minus one day

Until the start of Free The Word 2010. Hopefully we'll see lots of you tomorrow night at The Ex-Empire Strikes Back at the Purcell Room. Full programme for the next few days available here.

'You are free to write'

Frances Booth on 26:50 at The Guardian's Joe Public blog.